Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to making a mistake earlier this week when they failed to remove a page that encouraged armed Americans to take to the streets of Kenosha.
Zuckerberg posted a video on Friday that said that the page for the “Kenosha Guard” violated Facebook’s rules against violent militias and had been flagged by “a bunch of people.
The call made by the page led to armed vigilantes storming the peaceful protest in Kenosha, which resulted in the death of two protesters, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and wounded a third.
Facebook had taken down the page on Wednesday, as well as posts praising the shooting and the shooter.
“It was largely an operational mistake,” said Zuckerberg, “The contractors, the reviewers, who the initial complaints were funneled to, didn’t, basically didn’t pick this up.”
“On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized this violated the policies, and we took it down,” the CEO said
However, he did not apologize for the error, but instead defended that Facebook has yet to find a link between the Kenosha Guard page and Kyle Rittenhouse – the 17-year-old charged in the slayings on Tuesday.
Facebook announced last week that it would crack down on militia organizations that advocated for violence or spoke about the potential for violence.
But the lack of enforcement of the policy led to the spread of violent messages on the platform directly linked to the events in Kenosha.
“What’s going on in Kenosha … is really deeply troubling,” Zuckerberg said.
He also said the company is working on improving the execution of the policies, but did not provide any details.
“We’re going to continue to enforce our policies, and continue evolving the policies to be able to identify more potential dangerous organizations, and improve our execution in order to keep on getting ahead of this.”